YouTube announced that it is cracking down on videos with inflated, fraudulent view counts more aggressively than ever. While they’ve had some tactics in place already, they’re getting more vigilant at going after videos with views that weren’t earned.

“YouTube isn’t just a place for videos, it’s a place for meaningful human interaction,” says Google software engineer Philipp Pfeffenberger. “Whether it’s views, likes, or comments, these interactions both represent and inform how creators connect with their audience. That’s why we take the accuracy of these interactions very seriously. When some bad actors try to game the system by artificially inflating view counts, they’re not just misleading fans about the popularity of a video, they’re undermining one of YouTube’s most important and unique qualities.”

“As part of our long-standing effort to keep YouTube authentic and full of meaningful interactions, we’ve begun periodically auditing the views a video has received,” he adds. “While in the past we would scan views for spam immediately after they occurred, starting today we will periodically validate the video’s view count, removing fraudulent views as new evidence comes to light. We don’t expect this approach to affect more than a minuscule fraction of videos on YouTube, but we believe it’s crucial to improving the accuracy of view counts and maintaining the trust of our fans and creators.”

That’s a lot more generous that Google is with this kind of thing happening in it search engine. If you get busted for paid links, for example, you’re site will pretty much lose all visibility whatsoever.

The company is telling YouTube video creators to be “extra careful” when working with third-party marketing firms, because some of them will sell fake reviews.

This also mirrors the search space, as it is often third parties that get sites busted with questionable linking strategies. It even happened to Google itself, leading to Google having to penalize its own Chrome site as to not be hypocritical.

Image via YouTube